So after seeing the most recent Captain America, I have to say that the way Brubaker (and, through his pen, Faustus) makes use of standard Golden Age comic book themes is very neat.
Kid sidekicks, back in the Golden Age (and beyond, for those comic companies who retained the kid sidekick) were kids who had been in some way traumatized. Generally orphaned, because (a) the hero couldn't be the parent because a parent wouldn't take the kid into danger like the hero did, and (b) the hero couldn't be the parent because he needed to maintain a youthful, vigorous image. In some cases the kid sidekick, like Dick Grayson, had been witness to the actual deaths of his parents (I'm sticking with the male pronouns here because just about all the heroes and sidekicks were male), although I think more often the kid was just identified as an orphan and no further details were given. (Movies of the time were full of spunky, mouthy orphans who nonetheless had hearts of gold--because a kid with parents couldn't have been given as much freedom to act as these kids were.)
Golden Age Bucky was a pretty typical comic/movie orphan of the time, enjoying the lack of parental control (and subsequent ability to roam the countryside with Captain America as needed) while never really addressing the problems associated with having no parents. Since their deaths took place somewhere in the hazy past, the readers would have presumed that he was long over any period of mourning that had taken place, if they'd thought about it at all, which very likely they did not.
(It may have been that Robin was an exception to this rule in that his parents' death is specifically part of his origin, but it seems designed to match up with Batman's own origin. And, in practice, neither Batman nor Robin seemed to think all that often about their parents back then--both were pretty light-hearted most of the time.)
In any case, Bucky's parents didn't die in order to inspire him to greatness--they died so that he'd be an orphan and therefore available to help Cap. Oddly, while Bucky stayed at the camp, his sister (a Silver Age or later addition, I think) was was sent off to boarding school--staying at the camp was his choice and preference, according to the current text, but could possibly have been due to the fighting and bullying, limiting other options--the equivalent of "military school" for a trouble-maker? And even if he would rather be there, his separation from his sister was still more separation from the familiar, and possibly an indication to him that she was welcome elsewhere and he was not.
However, just because the Golden Age didn't show the effects doesn't have to mean they weren't there, and Faustus sees them and makes good use of them. Nothing he tries on Bucky works at first. He tries to convince him that Captain America was a Nazi, and it doesn't work--there's no way that Bucky would believe that. He then tries to put across the idea that the Invaders were vicious thugs, taking joy in killing the enemy--again, no dice, Bucky's faith in his comrades' heroism is unshakable.
Then Faustus takes a more subtle tactic--he plays on Bucky's abandonment issues (based in his childhood), twisting the truth of his and Cap's disappearance and telling him that, rather than urging him to get off of the rocket, Cap had insisted that he stay on it to disarm it, while jumping off himself because he was the important one. Not at all like Cap, but very close to Bucky's own fear of not measuring up, lack of self-worth, and subconscious expectation that those you care about will eventually leave you.
He doesn't question Cap's devotion to the American ideal. He doesn't question whether the Invaders were real heroes. He has faith in them. What he does question is his own right to be counted among their number, his own worth. He doesn't seem to think that Cap would have been his friend if he'd known what he was "really" like ("...the worst in you...you'd never let him see that part..."). That, combined with the fact that he sees even good relationships as tenuous and easily lost, makes this the thing that gets Faustus' foot in the door.
Whether or not Bucky really believes that Cap would have left him, he doesn't believe, not really, that he was Cap's equal partner. He doesn't believe that he deserved to be on the team. And he fears that those aspects of his character that he tried to hide from Cap--the fighting and bullying, the "mean streak" Faustus praises--are all there truly is to him. (And it's true enough that, as the Winter Soldier, he was encouraged to emphasize them--that he was valued for these characteristics.) Therefore this scenario is not as implausible to him as the others were. And therefore it's the one that works.
Yes, I know that it's uncertain whether the brainwashing really worked, or whether WS is playing along. Just saying that it's not unreasonable that this is what would have worked.
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